Measured intervals Marseille

Measured Intervals Marseille is a design-studies book by Harry MC, developed from fieldwork and photography in the Marseille area. It continues the architectural stripe investigation in a distilled register, less about accumulation, more about proportion, pause, and how a canvas holds light. The studies that follow are not pictures of the city. They are translations of what Marseille demonstrates most clearly: vertical division as a way of organising vision, and colour as something discovered through adjacency rather than explained by story.

The fieldwork gathers evidence rather than “views”. Marseille offers a contemporary architectural education in concrete, steel, glass and maritime reflection, with scale shifting quickly from intimate streets to vast cultural buildings and working harbour infrastructure. Certain sites make the interval logic unusually legible. MUCEM acts as a key reference point: its concrete lattice remains fixed, yet appears endlessly variable as sun angle and sea-light change. Around the Vieux-Port, masts, barriers, railings and pilings accumulate into structures that begin to read as measured rhythm once you stop seeing them as clutter. Fort Saint-Jean tightens the experience into courtyards and cut shadow; the lanes of Le Panier return the city to human scale, repetition, repair, typography, and surfaces continually rewritten.

The Marseille volume brings together fieldwork photographs with studio studies. The studies test stripe width and height, the spacing of intervals, and colour adjacency inside a deliberately limited language. Narrow white separations function as measured pauses — not decoration — sharpening edges and allowing each colour to establish its temperature cleanly. The colour field “floats” within a white ground, stopping short on all four sides, shifting the work from pattern toward objecthood: colour suspended within light, the sequence reading as a calibrated architectural presence rather than a surface effect. Within that field, widths are deliberately unequal and heights vary, preventing the rhythm from becoming a fence; the widest bands carry weight, the narrowest accelerate the cadence, and the whole holds its clarity while remaining responsive and alive.

Marseille’s character also widens the palette. Alongside maritime blues and concrete greys, other notes enter as the fieldwork broadens, warmer stone, sharper graphic contrasts, occasional flashes of colour, while the discipline remains constant: measured relationships held steady through interval, proportion, and sequence. This is a book made primarily as a gallery object and studio reference, a way of showing the range of possible resolutions within the Marseille register, and a way of keeping the work anchored in observation even as it moves toward abstraction.

Fieldwork locations referenced in the Marseille archive include the Cité Radieuse by Le Corbusier, Maison Empereur, La Friche la Belle de Mai, and Fondation Carmignac.

Hardback · 216mm x 279mm landscape · approx. 80 pages · Published by Florence & Gertrude Editions · ISBN 978-1-9195016-2-8